The Girl In The Willow
by MandyJane
Summary: She had always dreamed of him, and after it happened she just retreated into the dreams, where everything is safe and happy and living...but no-one can live on dreams. Oneshot.


He's there. Always.

It's a tragedy, they all said. They descended on the house with flapping robes and the stifling smell of peppermint and thousands upon thousands of clichéd sympathies. They never seemed to leave, squatting in the living room and kitchen like distorted crows, constantly watching with judging eyes, churning out pot after pot of tea that burnt her numb lips with every sip. Every corner was filled with the cloying pity, blocking up every window and door until she couldn't escape it at all, even when she slept.

But they all left eventually, billowing away with muttered accusations of neglect and glibness. It should have been a relief, but with them gone there were no distractions, just the long summer stretching out before her. A summer that should have been bright and joyful, but had become dark and grey as if a permanent storm cloud covered the entire country.

And then it happened. On a perfectly ordinary day, in a perfectly ordinary place, she saw him. Walking away from her down the street, his blond hair and broad shoulders clearly silhouetted against the grey sky. She froze in shock, stared after him until he turned the corner and disappeared down a side street. Then she began to run, shoving past people and tripping over cobblestones, desperate to confirm her wildest dream of all. She sprinted down the street, black hair whipping in the wind, and careened around the corner and along the narrow alleyway. It led to a little courtyard, a row of small, neat houses, but he wasn't there. She leant back against the cool stone wall, sank to the ground and lowered her head to her knees as her body shook with sobs, cheated and yet relieved not to be proved wrong. She knew she had seen him, he was alive.

After that she saw him everywhere, like some teasing presence just outside her field of vision, just like he was still alive. He was every person passing the window of her small house, every hand that brushed her arm while she shopped. Then she began to look for him, staring out of the car window at faces along the road, watching passers-by as she sat in a coffee shop. She started roaming about the hills, ignoring the weather in the blind hope that she might see him on some windswept slope one day. She withdrew further and further into herself, avoiding her parents and not answering her friends' frantic letters.

Then the dreams started. The heady, truly incredible dreams where she found him in some unexpected place, waiting for her, and he explained how he stayed alive and she revealed how she never gave up and they reunited in a glorious explosion of joy, tears and gut-wrenching relief, and they clung to each other as if they might be ripped apart at any moment. When she awoke she could still feel the imprint of his arms around her, just as he had held her so often before.

Her mother didn't notice that she was going to bed earlier and getting up later every day, just in the hope of dreaming about him. Her mother didn't notice when half her suitcase was filled with letters and photos from years gone by. Her mother didn't notice the tears streaming down her face when the station came into view, or the stiff goodbye her daughter gave, or the wary looks everyone gave her as she stalked to the train, flinching whenever anyone came close.

She began the year in a daze, always searching to be alone so that she could sink into that perfect daydream of finding him just around a corner, just a staircase above. She hardly did any homework at all, always rolling into her soft mattress and closing her curtains as soon as dusk fell, waiting to see him again. She prayed all day for signs to come in her dreams, any clue that might lead her to him one day. And she saw him in everything around the castle, every tapestry had his face, every tall, broad-shouldered boy resembled him, every zooming flyer in yellow and black had his restless energy.

And then, all of a sudden, she did find him. She found his determination, his loyalty, his unshakeable belief that he could change the world – in Harry. The boy that everyone knew. The boy who had lived, where he had died. So she stayed near him, joining his strange group, talking to him, smiling with him, never looking directly at him because the she could pretend that he wasn't himself, that he actually was Cedric.

But she lost it, this silly dream, when she kissed him. It seemed so right at first, so like it had been before. Long fingers curling around her waist, toes in scuffed shoes meeting her own feet, the wonderful closeness – and then she realised. That it was wrong, wrong in every way, detestable, disgusting, despicable. His green eyes stared at her in horror as she started to cry,, great gulping sobs that only intensified as she took in his faced, his stupid, different, _wrong _face with those eyes that bored into her very soul and made her feel like the lowest piece of dirt on the globe for pretending he was someone else, someone so similar and yet so heartbreakingly breathtakingly different.

She cried every night for weeks, sleeping without dreams, which made her cry even more in the morning. She moved around the castle like a ghost, tear tracks down her pale, ravaged face, long hair hanging limp around her. She shrank, becoming less of a person every time she saw him again, ever time his handsome, happy face floated past her eyes. Every time she re-read his letters in a vain attempt to bring him back. She began staying up, deliberately keeping herself awake to avoid the pain that came of not dreaming about him.

The end of the year brought no change. The events that shook the rest of the world had no effect on her at all, they just passed her by like the dark clouds in the sky. She was even less at home that summer, waking early and slipping out of the back door into the howling highland winds, returning long after dark had fallen. She never slept, as far as anyone could tell, just lived as though she hovered above the ground, never touching anything.

She grew weaker and weaker, exhausted with fruitless hope and too much emotion. She stayed out later and later each night, until one day she didn't come home at all.

They found her body lying beneath a tree, curled in on herself like a baby beneath a small carving. Four letters, in a heart: CD + CC. There was a small smile on her face, as if she had finally found what she'd been hoping for.

They laid her down in the soil by the lake, and planted a weeping willow on her grave. Someone carved the letters on the tree again, in some sort of homage. And as time passed, the legend took hold that when the wind blows through the tree's branches, you can hear her silvery laughter pouring along the lakeshore.

**A/N - Sooo what did you think? A review is definitely the best way of telling me ;) MandyJane**


End file.
